Home for Christmas
by illuminata79
Summary: Having returned to her native country, a woman has an evocative chance meeting during her Christmas shopping.


After a long break aka writer's block, my desire to whip up a little Christmas offering got the creative juices flowing again.

A wonderful holiday season to y'all!

* * *

She was walking down Pitt Street, bustling with people in the heat, and getting rather annoyed by the masses of folks on the move. Even the glitter and sparkle of the Christmas decorations that she usually liked grated on her today.

Unnerved by the crowd, she turned into a side street and followed it until she emerged in a quieter part of the city where the shops were smaller and less expensive and the decorations less flashy.

She passed a little grocery store with a striped awning that shadowed a big trestle table laden with crates of fruit and vegetables. Across the road was a bakery with a long queue inside that snaked almost up to the glass door. She was surprised how patiently people were waiting to be served, a nice change from the mad hurry downtown.

She heaved a deep sigh as she stopped to look around for a flower shop or some other place to buy a gift for the sister-in-law she hardly knew.

It was her first Christmas back home, but she did not look forward to it a lot, for it was also the first Christmas that she was single again.

Personally, she knew that splitting up with Jack had been the right thing to do.

In fact, what else could she possibly have done after she'd found out he was screwing his secretary? Stay, put on a brave face and turn a blind eye, like so many other unhappy wives did for fear of losing the family's sole breadwinner?

That they had never had any kids, something that Jack had always bemoaned a lot more than she had, turned out to be a good thing in the end, as it made her decision easier.

She had not been afraid of having to provide for herself. She had always worked since she had left school, and she had deeply hated the fact that Jack had wanted her to stay at home because he was so proud that his salary was good enough to sustain two, and in style, too.

So now things were basically better than before.

She was free again, and she was home again, she had an okay job and a nice enough apartment and no one to order her around, but to her family, the separation and ongoing divorce was a big disaster and Amelia a poor little wronged creature to be coddled and pitied and fussed over endlessly.

She knew they meant well, but she could hardly stand their pity and their righteous rage on her behalf.

That Jackson was an arsehole was nothing she didn't know herself, and she would have preferred to get over it and go on with her life, telling people that she had "lost" her husband but that she was alright and didn't want to talk about what had happened.

She had been secretly fantasizing about spending Christmas Day on her own in the apartment which had just begun to feel like her own after she had finally managed to unpack all the boxes and even put up a little artificial tree, but of course her family would have none of that, and she had consequently been invited to celebrate Christmas Day at Greg and Molly's and to spend a couple of days at her parents' farm after that.

A bit further down the road, she glimpsed a shop window filled with elaborate flower arrangements and potted plants decorated with Christmassy ornaments and decided to buy a present for Molly there.

Just as she stepped to the curb to cross the street, the bakery door opened, setting off the tinny jangling of small bells, and a man and a girl appeared.

She was a cheeky little thing, not cute in that awful, simpering doll-like way, but charming and lively with her chestnut curls and big curious eyes, chattering eagerly while her dad listened with earnest patience.

She smiled. The scene reminded her of herself and her own father. As the middle child of five and the only girl, he had never explicitly favoured her but had surely had a soft spot for his daughter.

At second glance, she realized that it was not only her own sweet father-and-daughter memories that the two of them had evoked.

She believed she knew this man.

She stopped dead in her tracks between two parked cars and waved apologetically at the driver of the European saloon who had slowed down to let her cross and now obviously wondered why the heck she didn't move.

She cast another look across the road.

Yes, it _was_ him.

Her eyes grew misty, and her mind travelled back a good ten years, back to when she had known him and many other young men like him – back to when she had been a nurse in the military hospital in Brisbane.

There had been the jokers and the shameless flirts, the grumpy and the bitter ones, the whiners and the stoic sufferers, and some poor sods too sick and weak to complain.

Each of her patients more or less fitted into one of these categories, and faces and names started to blur into each other as the war dragged on month after miserable month and a steadily changing mass of wounded soldiers kept pouring in.

Still there had been a few who stood out and whom she still remembered clearly after all these years.

There had been Clarkson, the historian and writer. She had forgotten his first name, but she could still hear him asking for more and more writing materials so he could commit his personal wartime experience to paper as long as events were still fresh in his memory and the details still exact.

He had been an ugly figure at first glance, with sharp features and unkempt lank hair of indefinable colour that he wore as long as rules would permit, but he had a lovely, somewhat distracted smile and a wry, witty sense of humour. He had even written her a poem of thanks before he had been discharged.

She must still have it somewhere, tucked away with the other wartime memorabilia like her nurse's uniform and a small photo album.

There had been Peter Gillis, who had been about to enter the Boston seminary to become a priest when a friend persuaded him to enlist. He had lost a hand and sight in one eye to an exploding grenade and bore his fate with a serene resignation that had impressed her. He had said he believed that it had been God's will and that he was sure He had plans with him, whatever they were.

He had not been sanctimonious or self-righteous as men who feel they have a special calling often are, and Amelia had hoped he would stick with his career plans despite the injuries he had suffered. The likes of him were the kind of priests the world needed, she had used to think.

But Gillis had said he wanted to live life to its fullest now that he had miraculously survived this carnage, and that he'd also be able to do good, and maybe even more of it, in a different profession.

As far as she knew, he had married his old girlfriend in the end and become a counseling psychologist or whatever they called it, working, among other things, with war veterans.

And, above all, there had been Carpenter.

Mick Carpenter was the one she thought about the most even after all this time. His background had been quite unusual – a Maine fisherman turned sailor turned South Sea pearl diver with a researcher-writer girlfriend who had become something of a celebrity when her book about the natives in a tiny Pacific island climbed to the top of various best-seller lists.

She wondered if he had married the woman in the end, after their post-war reunion she herself had helped bring about.

He had been a tall and well-built man, muscular but not ridiculously so, with unruly black hair cut rather short and parted on the side, which gave him a bit of a schoolboyish appearance despite the sprinkles of grey that began to appear around the temples.

He had also had a special kind of face, striking, chiseled cheekbones and those large green eyes that always bore a hint of an infinite sadness hidden deep within.

He had been very polite and thankfully appreciative of any small favour, but he had remained distant and reticent until, one day, she had found him in a windowed nook in the corridor, leaning his forehead against the pane of the window he had been trying in vain to wrest open, struggling to keep his balance on the crutches he had not yet got used to. His twitching shoulders had betrayed that he was crying.

The sight of this big man weeping had broken her heart and made her feel like an intruder. She had wanted to sneak away, for she had been sure he would hate being seen like this, but her rubber soles had squeaked on the linoleum floor, and he had looked up involuntarily.

This had been the beginning of a bond between them that Sister Rafferty would never have condoned. They had always made sure to be very careful not to make formidable Raffles suspicious, and their clandestine conspiracies had remained undetected and finally developed into a real friendship.

Amelia had been his sole confidante, as he had no family and had lost touch with his beloved, too, and she had tried to guide him through his darkest valleys, helped him find his lovely lady again and set him up with Mrs. Cunningham when he had been looking for a place to stay after getting out of hospital.

And every Boxing Day since 1945, she had remembered him particularly, for a reason.

 _Amelia had hardly rung the doorbell when the gleaming red front door was flung open and a dainty woman in her sixties, impeccably attired in an old-fashioned, high-necked dress with a little lacy collar, beamed at her._

" _Miss Heffernan! How nice to see you!" she called out. "It_ is _still Miss Heffernan, isn't it?"_

" _Oh, yes, it is, Mrs. Cunningham", Amelia laughed. "I haven't found a man to marry since we spoke on the phone last week. How are you doing?"_

" _As good as it gets with Johnny gone", Mrs. Cunningham answered, her eyes darkening for a split second. "I'm glad to have your young corporal around now, so I'm not alone in the house. He's not much of a talker, but it's a pleasure to have him nevertheless, he's such a nice and well-mannered person."_

" _Yes, he's a lovely fellow", Amelia replied gently._

 _The little smile playing around her lips as she spoke did not escape Mrs. Cunningham's keen eye, and she asked slyly, "Say, Miss Heffernan, are you sure you haven't got yourself a fiancé after all?"_

" _No, Mrs. Cunningham", Amelia chuckled. "I've got no time for a husband. Mick, uh, Corporal Carpenter is just a … a patient who became a … kind of friend. It's great that you were able to accommodate him now that Nicky's moved out. He needed to get out of the hospital pretty badly."_

" _Lucky boy, Nicky, with the war ending before he was old enough to get drafted", Mrs. Cunningham said. "Bad enough the other two got hurt, but well, I'm glad they survived. How's Greg's knee coming along? And Tommy's eye?"_

" _The knee's making fine progress now, looks like he should be back to normal in a few months' time. But you know Greg, he's ever so impatient and bored to death and keeps grousing that he still can't play his sports. Tommy's eye is not too good, I'm afraid. The doctor doubts he'll ever be able to distinguish more than light and dark again. He's rather cool about it, though, says he's still got the other one to see all the important details of a pretty girl."_

 _Amelia's somber face belied her joking tone when she spoke of her brothers' injuries, although she knew from all the maimed servicemen she'd encountered in her ward over the course of the war that things could have been a lot worse than a damaged eye and a bashed-up knee. But still it was different if the young man returning home from hospital wearing an eye patch or a leg brace was of your own flesh and blood._

" _Oh, I miss that Heffernan humour", Mrs. Cunningham said wistfully. "Those boys always managed to see the funny side of things. We used to laugh so much together, no matter if it was Greg or Tom or Nicky I had around. I wish I could get your Corporal Carpenter to laugh once in a while. He seems to take his injury, or life in general, pretty hard. He's always looking so earnest, and a little sad, too. Do you know what happened to him?"_

 _Amelia hesitated. It didn't feel right to elaborate on his background and his story without his consent, so she said cautiously, "Only that his leg had to be amputated after a rather harmless wound went bad. It was a close call at the time, and he sometimes made me think he'd have preferred to …" She couldn't bring herself to say it and hastily went on, "Well, never mind. I'm on my way to visit a friend, and I thought I'd look in on the two of you as a belated Christmas surprise."_

" _What a lovely idea. Your young man isn't here, though. He was a little … indisposed this morning and went off to the beach again to get a breath of fresh air. Go and see if you can find him and cheer him up a bit. We can have a cup of tea together afterwards. Now run. I know you can't wait to …"_

" _He's not my young man, Mrs. Cunningham!" Amelia interjected in mock exasperation before she left to follow the road that led down to the sea._

 _She searched the long sandy beach for the familiar tall figure on crutches, but he was nowhere to be seen._

 _Surely she couldn't have overlooked him on the strangely empty beach?_

 _She wondered idly why none of the people from this sleepy little town went swimming on such a splendid summer day while she strode across the sand down to the waterline. If I lived here, I'd be on the beach any chance I got, she thought. Having grown up on a large farm way inland, the sea never ceased to fascinate her._

 _She shielded her eyes against the sun with one hand, the wind playing softly with her hair, and looked up and down the beach once again, up to where the strip of sand bent out of sight. He wouldn't have walked that far, or would he?_

 _Turning around, she spied a flat rocky promontory that formed the northern edge of the little bay._

 _Nobody there either._

 _Perhaps he had not gone down to the beach after all. He could have gone anywhere._

 _Quite disheartened, she decided to walk back to Mrs. Cunningham's. She didn't actually feel like a chat and a cuppa with the old lady now, but waiting there for him would be the only chance she had if she wanted to see him today. After all, that had been the real reason why she had made the little detour to drop by the old lady's place on her way to Theresa's._

 _As she drew nearer to the rocky ledge, she realized with a small shock that what she had taken for large pieces of driftwood washed up at the foot of the rocks was actually a pair of crutches._

 _She hurried over, heart racing. There was also a bundle of discarded clothing. Her hand was shaking slightly as she picked up a navy cotton shirt, a little washed out around the seams. Underneath, she found a single brown loafer._

 _She drew a sharp breath._

 _Carpenter himself was nowhere to be seen, not on land, not in the water._

 _Where could he have gone off to, without his crutches?_

 _Her fingers dug into the sturdy fabric of the shirt as a sinking feeling grabbed hold of her, a chilling, dreadful certainty._

 _He had tried again._

" _Damn you, Carpenter", she muttered under her breath and, squinting, frantically scanned the waves, not yet ready to give up hope against better knowledge, still clutching at the blue shirt._

 _Nothing._

 _She kicked off her shoes, threw the shirt aside and ran. She plowed through the shallows, water splashing up to drench her skirt, and yelled his name in a frenzied high-pitched voice among the loud rush of the waves, cursing him wildly in between._

" _I didn't save your fucking life just for you to throw it away after all, you idiot!" she cried out with tears spilling from her eyes._

 _A seagull's shrill cry echoed her screams, making her want to hit it with a large rock. She actually looked around the ground for something to fling at the bird, and as she straightened up to search the waves once more, not quite ready to concede it would be fruitless, she detected a small black spot bobbing on the blue-green waters, way out there._

 _She ran further into the surf, jumping back when a large wave came rushing at her and left her wet from head to toe nevertheless as it broke._

 _By the time she had wiped her face halfway dry and pushed strands of dripping hair from her face, the little speck had come closer, now recognizably the back of a dark-haired man's head, and she could also make out broad shoulders and a pair of arms parting the water in a slow but steady rhythm._

 _She felt so weak in the knees that she sat down there and then. Her dress was sodden anyway._

" _Damn you, Carpenter", she said again, with a hysterical giggle, tears streaming freely down her cheeks. "Damn you to hell!"_

 _She tried to get up but could not find her feet with all the turmoil going on inside her, although she knew she must not let him see her like that, soaked and weepy and behaving like she'd lost her mind._

 _Eventually she did manage to scramble to her feet and hastily stumbled away, wringing water from her hair and skirt, heading straight for her boarding house instead of returning to Mrs. Cunningham's because she didn't want her to see in what state she was in either, and because she didn't want to give Mrs. Cunningham the triumph of finding that what she had so rightly suspected and Amelia had so hotly denied was true after all._

 _She was in love with him._

 _It had been the moment that she helped him tuck up his empty trouser leg one morning before he grudgingly joined his comrades for the Purple Heart ceremony in the hospital gardens._

 _He had turned his head to look at her with his big sad eyes, telling her wordlessly just how little he cared about this medal, and she, strangely, had admitted to herself for the first time that she was physically attracted to this man despite his missing leg and his tortured soul, had sensed this little ache deep down, this desire to make his life good again and to repair his shattered world and grow old with him._

 _It was foolish, it was embarrassing, it was impossible, but it was true._

 _She had kept a firm lid on her emotions and never breathed a word to anyone._

 _She knew that nothing would ever come out of it. She knew she was behaving like a schoolgirl. She knew that he might even be angry with her if he ever found out, what with his desperate feelings for his adventurous researcher lady, and even if he had been free, he would probably not have chosen plain, unexciting Amelia, the girl who was born to be a sensible, humorous, reliable sidekick forever and would never be the dazzling beauty who got the prince in the end._

 _But still she couldn't help it, not even now that he was gone from the hospital._

 _More mortified than ever, she hurried back to Miss Latham's boarding house, glad nobody had seen her with her dress clinging wetly to her body and her hair plastered to her skull, and she had fled from the town the next morning without ever turning back._

When Jackson Fielding asked her out one day not much later, she had been glad about the distraction, and in the end, she had hooked up with him just because he was there and might help her get over her childish crush on Carpenter.

The marriage, however, had been bound to fail.

They had hardly known each other when she followed him to the States. She had missed home badly, hated staying at home instead of working, took little pleasure in life in general, and the one time she had dared write to Carpenter, Jack had confiscated the air-mail envelope from Australia that held his reply and tossed it into the fire before she'd had a chance to read more than the return address.

Again and again, she found herself comparing Jack's faults to what she thought Carpenter would have done in his stead, and in the end, it had almost been a relief when she had found out Jack's hours and hours of overtime in fact consisted of bonking Marla Simmonds on the conference-room table, which in turn meant that she, finally, had a reason to leave.

Amelia swallowed and blinked hard, forcing herself back into the here and now.

What had felt like an eternity, swept up in the wild rush of old memories and not-so-old feelings, could only have been a second or two, for he was still there, walking down the steps outside the bakery.

He moved with a noticeable limp, and she could now see the cane he was holding with his right hand, but he was walking on two feet, and quite well, too, with this darling little chatterbox bouncing along merrily by his side, carrying a large paper bag that was no doubt full of holiday treats.

The girl was looking up at her handsome dad as he negotiated the last step, and he smiled at her with loving indulgence before he let her feed him the last of the slice of apple pie she had been munching on.

He looked smashing, tanned and healthy, and, most of all, happy.

She wondered with just the tiniest pang in her chest if the girl was the daughter of his researcher or if he had got over her and married someone else.

From behind Amelia, a slender woman in a green dress appeared, a baby boy on her arm, nodded a friendly greeting and looked around, searching.

The little girl called out from the other side of the street. "Daddy, look, there's Mommy! And Paul!"

Amelia recognized the woman, whose hair gleamed in the sun like burnished copper, a split second before the little girl's dad gave a melodious shout.

"Evelyn! Over here!"

Amelia smiled to herself and was surprised she didn't feel any jealousy.

She stood and watched as the red-haired woman ruffled the girl's hair and explained something to her before the foursome disappeared, the man's broad back and swaying gait the last she saw of them, along with the wave and the smile the little girl inexplicably gave her before they turned the corner.


End file.
